The 18-volume edition of the Military Encyclopedia is a monument of military and scientific thought of the most distinguished Russian officers and a symbol of highly developed culture of publishing in Russia. To date, the publication remains an unsurpassed reference book on military history. It contains an enormous amount of information on history, military art, ethnography, and political systems of all regions of the globe.
The Military Encyclopedia was published by Sytin & Co from 1911 to 1915 under the editorship of Colonel of the General Staff Vasily Fedorovich Novitsky. In St. Petersburg, Sytin rented a special room for the encyclopedia editorial office and organized special workshops — for typesetting, drawing and preparing printer’s plates. Everything was done in such a way that the preparatory process was entirely under the control of the authors and editors, and the final version completely ready for printing was sent to Moscow, to the printing house.
The publication was richly illustrated. Each volume was accompanied by a large number of diagrams, geographical and topographic maps, plans, portraits and drawings, both included in the main text and featured on the inserts. Military engineers, officers of the General Staff, military lawyers, gunners, cavalrymen, doctors, ship engineers, sailors, and artists worked on the encyclopedia. The number of employees of the encyclopedia reached 300 people.
Compositionally, the encyclopedia is compiled alphabetically, but there are also four main sections: special military knowledge; military-technical knowledge and special branches of the armed forces; general military knowledge; naval knowledge.
18 volumes were released after
five years of preparatory work. They were highly appreciated by experts, but
did not find support from the Ministry of War and, above all, from the Minister
of War Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov, who objected to the distribution of
the encyclopedia in the army. By the beginning of the First World War, in
addition to the volumes already released, four more volumes were ready for
printing. However, the publication had to be suspended, as most of the authors
went to the active army, and the state did not provide any support to the
publisher. The encyclopedia remains unfinished; a total of 18 volumes were
published, the last entry of the 18thvolume is Port Arthur. Ivan
Sytin wrote bitterly about the situation,
